A Credible Threat Of Force, (Or The Lack There Of)

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As someone said to me over the weekend, “There are not enough glass parking lots in the Middle-East. They have no reason to take us seriously. We have weapons, that if used the way they were meant to be used, could win us this war decisively.”

He then went on to say something that he has repeated to me many times. “If we aren't going to fight this war the right way, as if we should win it, then we should not be fighting it at all.”

I think he is right.

I don't really understand how it came about, though I have some suspicions, but the West has forgotten how to fight wars.

Wars are not meant to be nice and polite affairs were nobody really gets hurt or even bruised, wars are meant to be terrible and horrific calamities that our enemies would want to avoid with us at every conceivable cost.

We should fight our wars so brutally and so lopsidedly that our enemies shiver at the very thought of us moving against them militarily.

Unfortunately, we have not fought our wars that way since World War Two.

Too many have forgotten, too many have never understood, that the lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that when our enemies believe that they have no hope for winning, and not even a hope of noble death in battle, they will surrender, and spare us the heavy burden of having to kill every damn one of them.

When our enemies have hope that they can prevail against us, that we will lack the will to pull the trigger or that we will let even the most ephemeral of things such as “world opinion” stay our hand, then our enemies will continue to fight us, forcing us into the position of having to kill many more of them as they kill many more of us than would otherwise be the case.

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SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just act--ask you about Iran. You brought up Iran. What should we do? Because we continue to hear more and more of just what you're saying. What should the United States do at this point about Iran?

Sen. LIEBERMAN: It's very important, Bob, because I didn't just go to Iraq, I went visited throughout the Arab world and Israel. And what you see throughout the Middle East is Iran in battle basically with us and the moderates, supplying the extremists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas fighting the Fatah faction, our allies among the Palestinians, and, of course, committing terrorists acts against the Israelis. I'm not one to say we shouldn't sit down with the Iranians. I'm glad we did that in Baghdad a while ago. What we did was present them with evidence that we have that I've seen that I believe is incontrovertible that the Iranians are training and equipping the Iraqi extremists to come into Iraq, and they're killing American soldiers and Iraqis. And I think this is a very important moment. If we're going to sit and talk about the Iranians, tell them what we want them to do, which is to stop doing that, because it's killing Americans, we can't leave it at that. I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike into--over the border into Iran where I--we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let's just stop right there, because I think you've probably made some news here, Senator Lieberman. You're saying that, if the--if the Iranians don't let up, that the United States should take military action against them.

Sen. LIEBERMAN: I am, and I want to make clear I'm not talking about a massive ground invasion of Iran or--but it--we have good evidence. We've told them, we've said so publicly that the Iranians have a base in Iran at which they are training Iraqis who are coming in and killing Americans. By some estimates they have killed as many as 200 American soldiers. Well, we can tell them we want them to stop that, but if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping for
instance their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them. If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force and, to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing now.

SCHIEFFER: Would you go in on the ground, or could you do that from the air?

Sen. LIEBERMAN: I'd leave that to the--to the generals in charge. I think you could probably do a lot of it from the air. But they can't believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans. It's just--we cannot let them get away with it. If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part, and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region, and ultimately right here at home.
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/face_061007.pdf